Back in the living room I see more red candles are lit and placed on the dining room table. The table is raised at the center like a spiral, draped by an embroidered white cloth, and there is a thin crooked brass tube shaped like a question mark dangling upside down from the ceiling, above the peak of the spiral. Beneath the tree there is a cabin, a woodland cabin high in the mountains owned by some wealthy entrepreneur. Agents storm all four stairwells of the abandoned apartment complex. The passage leads to the bottom floor of a many-storied warehouse. I slam the screen door shut and a swirl of desert sand blasts my face. In the final room of the underground complex we find a grandfather clock. Green helicopter search lights reflect off the wall of the next building over. The image of a map outlining the location of a series of costal towers and the track of an abandoned monorail – with a deep sense of related urgency – fade from my mind, leaving me sickened. Impossibility within the dream serves as a doorway.
2
A pale blond man next to me attempts to answer my question. The ceiling seems higher than the roof indicated from outside. He will wait here at the shore for the tide to take him away. Boxes of electronics, hygiene products, snack foods, and other useless items fill the place, a testament to the age that brought this upon us. I doubt the bus lines are in service here anyway. At the ends of the chains hang a variety of keys, some skeleton keys, some car keys, some electronic chipped security keys. We move to the center of the building away from the windows. I am handed a drink. Preserving these unrealities is a method for reconnecting with the real.
3
Everyone here is an unrecognized part of you. Were you to come here more often you might know them better. She tells me, “The owners are upstairs sleeping.” The approaching storm is more intimidating than I expected. Staircases lead to catwalks suspended from impossibly high ceilings. I’ve tread this stretch before, though never in its entirety. The face of the clock is decorated not with roman numerals but glyphs of a sort I’ve never seen, arranged in circles within each other, like a barometer combined with a compass combined with a clock. They’ve cut the power, but our night vision has increased greatly since the collapse. Something in the color and lighting here dulls feeling and memory. Operation within conceptual systems conditions the acceptance of the absence of novelty.
4
I look to the faces in the room, who have all gathered in a circle around the spiral of red candles. I think of asking her why are you here, and isn’t this dangerous, but I am eager to explore the interior of the house. We see its churning black mass gaining strength off the coast. More car parts, entertainment systems, and now I see weapons of a completely unfamiliar make. A bus I might’ve caught roars by me without slowing. There are more than two hands on the clock, and they appear to rotate irregularly. Papers with complex diagrams are pinned all over the walls, scale models of contraptions I’ve never imagined, with measurements in a colorful pictographic language. “Just let it go,” my old history teacher councils me. Novelty characterizes unconditioned experience.
5
I can see each of their golden faces, I scrutinize them trying to recognize someone, to no avail. She points to the skylights above us where the ceiling meets the south wall. We ascend the slope, over the hill, across the interstate littered with abandoned cars. Time is short, but I want to climb a little higher to find some indication of where we are. It disappears against the horizon. After executing a complex adjustment intuitively, the face retracts into the clock, which retracts into the wall and disappears, turning into a doorway. I pull a book from the shelf and lay it open on the floor. I never liked him, but this place feels so much better than wherever I just came from that I decide to take his advice.
6
In a different state of mind you might find this place differently. “Do you see it?” she asks me. There is morbid pleasure in the advantage of independence our destitution allows us. Only after climbing too high do I realize I’ve tarried too long. Twilight turns to starlight. The doorway leads back into another room. It’s a vellum edition, hand bound, what looks and smells like a leather cover but embossed with a self-correcting illumined glyph that corresponds to the user. Unconditioned experience always presents itself as an impossibility.
7
The last candle is placed on the spiral and everyone raises their arms, pointing their hands toward the center and moving in a slow circle around it, humming loudly in harmony. The panels depict different horizons and constellations, mostly dark blues and purples. We move beneath overpasses we know not where as the first fingers of storm make shore. The stairs are far longer on the way down than I remember. I will not be making it to my destination. I lift the lantern. Sitting before the blank pages, we close our eyes, we come to somewhere in Europe. The seamless is unreal.
8
As the crescendo of humming around the glowing spiral approaches, it occurs to me this scene resembles similar ones in several of the most important dreams I’ve had. The image cast on the floor changes with the alignment of the panels. “Let’s go,” I rasp to the others still digging through obsolete knick knacks. I light a cream-colored candle and place it on the front steps for him. An ill gust of wind from nowhere extinguishes our light. The cities here are destroyed too, but we suspect fewer militias. “Shh!” I implore her. A rustling comes from the other room. A cloud passes over the moon. The image disappears. The mind reaches beyond the confines of conceptualization toward that which is unthought.
No comments:
Post a Comment